Bioweapons: New Labs,More Terror?

November 5, 2001: An officer patrols the grounds on Capitol Hill. Police closed two Senate buildings after last fall's anthrax mailings.

It has been almost a year since the first anthrax letter was mailed last September 18. Since then, FBI agents and scientists have unraveled many of the mysteries surrounding the strain of anthrax, and have created a profile of the likely perpetrator: a lone man with a scientific background and access to laboratory equipment.

The anthrax he used, the Ames strain, is highly virulent, resistant to many vaccines, and a perennial favorite of military researchers—and bioterrorists. Its extraordinary concentration— one trillion spores per gram—and purity are believed to be characteristic of the kind manufactured using the optimal U.S. process.

Terrorists who want to mount a major attack with bioweapons would need substantial help from state sponsors to do so, according to many military and non-governmental biowarfare experts and a recent report from the General Accounting Office (GAO). But what if the assistance is unwitting, and the country is the United States?

The U.S. government's response to the bioterror threat, coupled with lack of oversight in the civilian biodefense sector, could endanger, instead of protect, the country. The Bush administration wants to build more labs so that more scientists can study the most dangerous pathogens. Such an expansion of the biodefense infrastructure could create a training ground for would-be bioterrorists.

An inside job?

On June 22, senior government officials said that scientists had determined the anthrax sent in the deadly mailings last fall was “fresh,” made no more than two years before it was mailed (New York Times, June 23). The finding makes it less likely that the anthrax was stolen from a lab, and more likely that the perpetrator is connected to the biodefense establishment. Although the “Amerithrax” investigation, as the FBI has dubbed it, has turned up no prime suspects, investigators have a long list of “persons of interest,” including 20-30 scientists and researchers. One of these men, Steven J. Hatful, is a biodefense researcher whose house has been searched more than once.

The germs isolated from the first fatal case of pulmonary anthrax in Florida were indistinguishable from those from Fort Detrick, Maryland, and Portón Down, Britain. 1 This further suggests that the anthrax attacks could have links to a sophisticated government biodefense program.

After the mailings, the U.S., Canadian, British, French, Israeli, and German governments all pledged to invest more money in civilian and military biodefense programs. In his 2003 budget proposal, President George W. Bush asked Congress to commit almost $6 billion of the discretionary budget to biodefense activities. In addition to buying and developing vaccines and drugs, much of the money is likely to be targeted at building a national infrastructure for detecting and treating infectious diseases. 2

These increased investments in biodefense are troubling for two reasons. First, last July the United States walked away from efforts to strengthen the compliance and verification protocol of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC). Citing doubts about the ability to verify treaty compliance, the administration refused to sign the protocol. The administration was also concerned about its potential impact on U.S. defensive biowar-fare research, and worried that pharmaceutical industry trade secrets would be jeopardized by an intrusive inspection regime.

Second, an increase in the bio-defense infrastructure, including the creation of new vaccines, could have the unintended consequence of making the country less, not more, secure.

A fool's paradise

The bioweapons treaty bans the development or production of agents and toxins, as well as the means to deliver them “for hostile purposes or in armed conflict,” yet permits research for “prophylactic, protective, or other peaceful purposes.” But what constitutes permissible defensive research under the treaty remains undefined. As a consequence, there is a growing risk that defensive research—and the knowledge base and infrastructure that support it—may have unintended effects.

Defensive research could act as a smokescreen for offensive military programs. There is ample precedent for this. Iraq, which signed but did not ratify the BWC in 1972, claimed for years that it was engaged in purely defensive bioweapons research, until a defector in 1995 disproved the “official” story. The Soviet Union signed and ratified the treaty in 1972—and from that point on engaged in a massive offensive bioweapons program, claiming it was defensive, until Boris Yeltsin admitted the truth in 1992. And Japan's Unit 731, an offensive biowarfare program of the 1930s and 1940s, was officially described as an “epidemic prevention and water supply unit.”

U.S. bioweapons policy has a long history of ambiguity. When the United States renounced its offensive bioweapons programs in 1969, President Nixon reserved the option to conduct offensive research for defensive purposes. In a national security decision memorandum, Henry Kissinger wrote: “The United States bacteriological/biological programs will be confined to research and development for defensive purposes (immunization, safety measures, etc.). This does not preclude research into those offensive aspects of bacteriological/biological agents necessary to determine what defensive measures are required.”

This position was fully consistent with several decades of U.S. policy. Sixty years ago, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson advised President Franklin Roosevelt on biowarfare: “To be sure, knowledge of the offensive possibilities will necessarily be developed because no proper defense can be prepared without a thorough study of means of offense.” 3

January 11, 2001: Australian scientists Bob Seamark and Ron Jackson inspect cultures of the mousepox virus, the deadly pathogen they inadvertently created.

After World War II, the British followed the same thinking. The British government wanted to focus on defense against biological attacks, “but felt it was essential to proceed with research into the offensive aspect of biological warfare, as until sufficient research in this sphere had been carried out, the true problems of defensive measures could not be wholly assessed.” 4

In 1958, Gen. William Creasy, commander of the U.S. Army Chemical Corps, told a congressional committee, “A defensive [chemical and biowarfare] program not supported by an offensive program can well be worthless. You cannot know how to defend against something unless you can visualize various methods which can be used against you, so you can be living in a fool's paradise if you do not have a vigorous munitions and dissemination type program.” 5

The question of intent

Problems with verifying the intent of military medical and scientific research, and the difficulty of detecting the development or use of bioweapons, have led to disputes between treaty members. In 1981, the United States claimed that a strange anthrax outbreak in Sverdlovsk in 1979 was caused by a Soviet violation of the BWC, but Soviet officials attributed it to natural causes. The U.S. allegations could not be proved. When the Soviet Union broke up, its secret offensive biowarfare program, which had been operating since the time it signed the BWC, was revealed. The Soviet explanation of the Sverdlovsk outbreak was repudiated.

More than 30 years ago, Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg said that “molecular biology might be exploited for military purposes and result in a biological weapons race whose aim could well become the most efficient means of removing man from the planet.” These comments seem prophetic in light of revelations about the mousepox experiments by R. J. Jackson in Australia, the Le-gionella multiple sclerosis studies by Sergei Popov in the Soviet Union, and the fabrication of more virulent or antibiotic-resistant strains of anthrax by the U.S. government. 6 In this era of “new genetics,” the next generation of biowarfare agents could be created—either intentionally or inadvertently—under the guise of biodefense research.

In the late 1990s, the JASONs, a group of academic defense advisers, concluded that “progress in biomed-ical science inevitably has a dark side, and potentiates the development of an entirely new class of weapons of mass destruction: genetically engineered pathogens, including ‘designer diseases’ and ‘stealth viruses.’” Should such weapons be developed and deployed, the medical, public health, and disease surveillance communities will always be in the position of responding to last year's threat, instead of current or future disease threats.

National insecurity

The last time the world was on the brink of a biological weapons race, Ronald Reagan was president, and the “evil empire” representing the danger of bioweapons was the Soviet Union. Shortly after Reagan took office, his administration stated that “biological weapons presented a heightened threat to national security.” 7 In response, between 1981 and 1987, Congress increased the budget of the army's Biological Defense Research Program (BDRP) six-fold, from $15 million to $90 million. 8 By 1990, Congress began oversight investigations to determine whether the investments in biosecurity were actually increasing the safety and security of U.S. fighting forces. The GAO found that more than half of these intramural and extramural research and development projects supported by the BDRP bore little relationship to the intelligence community's threat list, leading one commentator to observe that “because a credible medical defense for biological warfare defies scientific logic in the age of genetic engineering, the program offers a false sense of security.” 9 Shortly thereafter, Congress restricted the BDRP's funding to projects directed against threats identified as of the highest priority for force protection against germ warfare.

Today, two decades after Reagan's biodefense buildup, the situation is more dangerous than ever. The Bush administration wants to expand the biodefense infrastructure to agencies that are unprepared to handle that responsibility. As an example, take the recent outcry over the creation of a synthetic polio virus. The Defense Department-funded research was a stunt that contributed nothing to the field of virology, a “gee-whiz” activity that would never have received funding had the proposal been properly vetted through an agency equipped to evaluate the scientific and technical merit of research projects. The increase in such misdirected funding will weaken and endanger national biodefense because truly important issues will be either neglected or underfunded.

Another source of danger is the push to improve U.S. bioterror readiness by building more high-containment research facilities. President Bush is proposing an enormous increase and expansion in biodefense funding to combat a new evil—the “axis of evil.” In language that is eerily reminiscent of that heard 20 years ago, the call for a “robust” biodefense system has again come to the forefront of national security. But, unlike in the Reagan era, the response to the threat is not limited to the armed forces and the intelligence community.

Now, the civilian research infrastructure will play a much more important role—and the dangers of increasing the number of trained people with access to the building blocks and knowledge base of biowarfare could become all too apparent.

The dual-use dilemma

On March 14, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) detailed their research priorities for countering bioterrorism. Their broad goals include increased funding for treatment, diagnostics, and vaccines, as well as projects in applied immunology and genomics. These include studies on how pathogens affect humans as well as the genetics of biowarfare agents. 10 The NIH also plans to construct six to 10 new biosafety level-3 and -4 facilities to supplement the seven level-4 facilities that already exist or are nearing completion. In response, several other countries have announced plans to build their own high-containment facilities. This is a recipe for disaster.

At biosafety level-4 labs, the most dangerous of all pathogens—for which there are no known treatments or cures—are studied. These laboratories might become a pathogen-modification training academy or biowarfare agent “superstore.” The physical tools and technology of bioterror are relatively cheap—it's the knowledge and experience of working with pathogens that's priceless. Currently, there are no requirements for rigorous background or security clearance checks for those who work in such facilities. Oversight is focused on containment and limiting exposure to the pathogens; making sure those who work with them are psychologically fit to do so is not a priority.

Diluted smallpox vaccine is being tested by the Kaiser Permanente health maintenance organization in California.

Even more ominous are the military proposals that recently came to light, indicating that both the air force and navy are interested in the development of explicitly offensive anti-materiel biological weapons. Such research would be a direct violation of the bioweapons treaty. 11

The best defense may be fixing a flawed public health care system. An example of how bad things are came to light during a 1993 outbreak of Cryptosporidiosis in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the largest epidemic of waterborne disease in U.S. history. The outbreak, which affected more than 400,000 people, went undetected by the public health community until a local reporter discovered an absence of over-the-counter anti-diarrheal medications and toilet paper from the shelves of pharmacies and grocery stores.

If access to health care were guaranteed, the chance of detecting an epidemic early on would increase, because people would be more likely to visit their doctors at the first sign of illness. Several victims of the anthrax mailings last fall waited to visit their doctors until they were in the end stages of the pulmonary version of the disease, when it was already too late.

Biodefense research to combat the threat of germ warfare is inherently dual use. To create a working vaccine, one must first be familiar with the pathogen, and with this knowledge comes the capability to create offensive weapons.

To create useful vaccines, scientists must first know what agents are in an enemy's arsenal. If it contains unknown genetically engineered pathogens, it would be fruitless to spend valuable resources creating vaccines. It would be a guessing game. The military could spend millions on a smallpox vaccine, only to find that the enemy has weaponized plague, or a genetically modified strain of smallpox against which the vaccine is worthless. Even excluding genetically altered strains, there are so many pathogens available to potential bioterrorists that an “agent specific” biodefense strategy, one based on vaccine development and deployment, makes little pragmatic sense. Such an approach could also create an unwarranted and dangerous illusion of safety.

On the international level

The best defense against biological attack is a combination of a robust medical surveillance system, universal access to medical care, and domestic and international policies and practices that discourage the development of bioweapons.

Some experts suggest that short-notice, on-site inspections of declared facilities might help to verify compliance with the bioweapons treaty. But inspections can only go so far—a point well recognized in the United Nations Special Commission's experience in Iraq and in the early U.S. efforts to halt nuclear proliferation. The expertise, infrastructure, and agents needed to produce bioweapons are inherently dual use and can be easily disguised as biodefense activities.

If vaccines against biowarfare agents are developed, the responsibility for this effort should be entrusted to an international body specifically created for this purpose. This was recommended more than 10 years ago in the Final Declaration of the Fourth Review Conference of the BWC and has increased relevance today. State parties to the bioweapons treaty should consider this proposal for their next meeting in November, lest the world become mired in a biodefense arms race. •